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| The Importance of Hope in the Pro-Life Movement | The Importance of Hope in the Pro-Life Movement |
| (about 1 hour later) | |
| This newsletter is ultimately about hope. But I want to start with something else, a question that’s deeply relevant to the Republican Party and its 2024 presidential primary. The perceived answer to this question will likely swing the evangelical vote and decide the nomination. | This newsletter is ultimately about hope. But I want to start with something else, a question that’s deeply relevant to the Republican Party and its 2024 presidential primary. The perceived answer to this question will likely swing the evangelical vote and decide the nomination. |
| Who is the most pro-life president in modern American history? | Who is the most pro-life president in modern American history? |
| Many of Donald Trump’s defenders say that it’s him. The proof, they say, is the Supreme Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which was issued one year ago this week. Trump nominated three of the six justices who voted to uphold Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, and three of the five who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. He was indispensable to the pro-life movement’s greatest legal triumph, and in the months since Dobbs, state after state has enacted or enforced sharp limitations or near-total bans on abortion. So it has to be Trump, right? | Many of Donald Trump’s defenders say that it’s him. The proof, they say, is the Supreme Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which was issued one year ago this week. Trump nominated three of the six justices who voted to uphold Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, and three of the five who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. He was indispensable to the pro-life movement’s greatest legal triumph, and in the months since Dobbs, state after state has enacted or enforced sharp limitations or near-total bans on abortion. So it has to be Trump, right? |
| But if we change the metric from abortion law to actual, legal abortions, the picture is considerably different, and begins to challenge our assumptions about what it means to build a true pro-life culture in the United States. If the most important metric in determining a president’s pro-life credentials is the prevalence of abortions performed in the United States during his term, then the title of the most pro-life president in modern American history belongs, remarkably, to Barack Obama. It’s not close. And, Trump’s judicial nominations notwithstanding, a very long pro-life trend reversed itself during his presidency. | But if we change the metric from abortion law to actual, legal abortions, the picture is considerably different, and begins to challenge our assumptions about what it means to build a true pro-life culture in the United States. If the most important metric in determining a president’s pro-life credentials is the prevalence of abortions performed in the United States during his term, then the title of the most pro-life president in modern American history belongs, remarkably, to Barack Obama. It’s not close. And, Trump’s judicial nominations notwithstanding, a very long pro-life trend reversed itself during his presidency. |
| A tiny bit of history: According to the Guttmacher Institute, the American abortion rate (the number of abortions per 1,000 women) and abortion ratio (the number of abortions per 100 pregnancies) rose sharply in the years after the Supreme Court decided Roe in 1973. These figures essentially plateaued and then dipped slightly under Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and then began a long decline under each president since then … until Donald Trump. | A tiny bit of history: According to the Guttmacher Institute, the American abortion rate (the number of abortions per 1,000 women) and abortion ratio (the number of abortions per 100 pregnancies) rose sharply in the years after the Supreme Court decided Roe in 1973. These figures essentially plateaued and then dipped slightly under Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and then began a long decline under each president since then … until Donald Trump. |
| No president saw sharper decreases in the abortion rate and ratio from the first to the last year of his presidency than Barack Obama. In 2016, at the end of a presidency dominated by pro-choice policies and judicial nominations, there were a total of 874,080 abortions — 338,270 fewer than there were in 2008, the last year of the George W. Bush presidency. That’s a remarkable decline of 28 percent. The rate and ratio of abortions at the end of Obama’s second term were actually lower than it was in 1973. | |
| Yet that long trajectory toward lower abortion rates and ratios changed during Donald Trump’s single term. In spite of supposedly being the most pro-life president in American history, he presided over the first overall increase in the abortion rate and ratio during a presidency since Jimmy Carter. As a result, there were 56,080 more abortions in the final year of Trump’s presidency than there were in the final year of Obama’s. And no, this was not a Covid-induced blip: The abortion rate dipped slightly in 2017, the first year of Trump’s presidency, before rising in 2018, 2019 and 2020. |